Democracy Is Inevitable

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Cynical observers have always been fond of pointing out that business leaders who extol the virtues of democracy on ceremonial occasions would be the last to think of applying them to their own organizations. To the extent that this is true, however, it reflects a state of mind that is by no means peculiar to businesspeople but characterizes all Americans, if not perhaps all citizens of democracies.

This attitude is that democracy is a nice way of life for nice people, despite its manifold inconveniences—a kind of expensive and inefficient luxury, like owning a large medieval castle. Feelings about it are for the most part affectionate, even respectful, yet a little impatient. There are probably few people in the United States who have not at some time nourished in their hearts the blasphemous thought that life would go much more smoothly if democracy could be relegated to some kind of Sunday morning devotion.

The bluff practicality of the “nice but inefficient” stereotype masks a hidden idealism, however, for it implies that institutions can survive in a competitive environment through the sheer goodheartedness of those who maintain them. We challenge this notion. Even if all those benign sentiments were eradicated today, we would awaken tomorrow to find democracy still entrenched, buttressed by a set of economic, social, and political forces as practical as they are uncontrollable.

Democracy has been so widely embraced not because of some vague yearning for human rights but because under certain conditions it is a more “efficient” form of social organization. (Our concept of efficiency includes the ability to survive and prosper.) It is not accidental that those nations of the world that have endured longest under conditions of relative wealth and stability are democratic, while authoritarian regimes have, with few exceptions, either crumbled or eked out a precarious and backward existence.

Despite this evidence, even so acute a statesman as Adlai Stevenson argued in a New York Times article on November 4, 1962, that the goals of the Communists are different from ours. “They are interested in power,” he said, “we in community. With such fundamentally different aims, how is it possible to compare communism and democracy in terms of efficiency?”

Democracy (whether capitalistic or socialistic is not at issue here) is the only system that can successfully cope with the changing demands of contemporary civilization. We are not necessarily endorsing democracy as such; one might reasonably argue that industrial civilization is pernicious and should be abolished. We suggest merely that given a desire to survive in this civilization, democracy is the most effective means to this end.

Democracy Takes Over

There are signs that our business community is becoming aware of democracy’s efficiency. Several of the newest and most rapidly blooming companies in the United States boast unusually democratic organizations. Even more surprising, some of the largest established corporations have been moving steadily, if accidentally, toward democratization. Feeling that administrative vitality and creativity were lacking in their systems of organization, they enlisted the support of social scientists and outside programs. The net effect has been to democratize their organizations. Executives and even entire management staffs have been sent to participate in human relations and organizational laboratories to learn skills and attitudes that ten years ago would have been denounced as anarchic and revolutionary. At these meetings, status prerogatives and traditional concepts of authority are severely challenged.

Many social scientists have played an important role in this development. The contemporary theories of McGregor, Likert, Argyris, and Blake have paved the way to a new social architecture. Research and training centers at the National Training Laboratories, Tavistock Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Business School, Boston University, University of California at Los Angeles, Case Institute of Technology, and others have pioneered in applying social science knowledge to improving organizational effectiveness. The forecast seems to hold genuine promise of progress.

System of Values. What we have in mind when we use the term “democracy” is not “permissiveness” or “laissez-faire” but a system of values—a climate of beliefs governing behavior—that people are internally compelled to affirm by deeds as well as words. These values include:

1. Full and free communication, regardless of rank and power.

2. A reliance on consensus rather than on coercion or compromise to manage conflict.

3. The idea that influence is based on technical competence and knowledge rather than on the vagaries of personal whims or prerogatives of power.

4. An atmosphere that permits and even encourages emotional expression as well as task-oriented behavior.

5. A basically human bias, one that accepts the inevitability of conflict between the organization and the individual but is willing to cope with and mediate this conflict on rational grounds.

Changes along these dimensions are being promoted widely in U.S. industry. Most important for our analysis is what we believe to be the reason for these changes: democracy becomes a functional necessity whenever a social system is competing for survival under conditions of chronic change.

Adaptability to Change

Technological innovation is the most familiar variety of such change to the inhabitants of the modern world. But if change has now become a permanent and accelerating factor in American life, then adaptability to change becomes the most important determinant of survival. The profit, the saving, the efficiency, and the morale of the moment become secondary to keeping the door open for rapid readjustment to changing conditions.

Organization and communication research at MIT reveals quite dramatically what type of organization is best suited for which kind of environment. Specifically:

For simple tasks under static conditions, an autocratic, centralized structure, such as has characterized most industrial organizations in the past, is quicker, neater, and more efficient.

But for adaptability to changing conditions, for “rapid acceptance of a new idea,” for “flexibility in dealing with novel problems, generally high morale and loyalty . . . the more egalitarian or decentralized type seems to work better.” One of the reasons for this is that the centralized decision maker is “apt to discard an idea on the grounds that he is too busy or the idea too impractical.”1

Our argument for democracy rests on an additional factor, one that is fairly complicated but profoundly important. Modern industrial organization has been based roughly on the antiquated system of the military. Relics of this can still be found in clumsy terminology such as “line and staff,” “standard operating procedure,” “table of organization,” and so on. Other remnants can be seen in the emotional and mental assumptions regarding work and motivation held today by some managers and industrial consultants. By and large, these conceptions are changing, and even the military is moving away from the oversimplified and questionable assumptions on which its organization was originally based. Even more striking, as we have mentioned, are developments taking place in industry, no less profound than a fundamental move from the autocratic and arbitrary vagaries of the past toward democratic decision making.

This change has been coming about because of the palpable inadequacy of the military-bureaucratic model, particularly its response to rapid change, and because the institution of science is now emerging as a more suitable model.

Why is science gaining acceptance as a model? Not because we teach and conduct research within research-oriented universities. Curiously enough, universities have been resistant to democratization, far more so than most other institutions.

Science is winning out because the challenges facing modern enterprises are knowledge-gathering, truth-requiring dilemmas. Managers are not scientists, nor do we expect them to be. But the processes of problem solving, conflict resolution, and recognition of dilemmas have great kinship with the academic pursuit of truth. The institution of science is the only institution based on and geared for change. It is built not only to adapt to change but also to overthrow and create change. So it is—and will be—with modern industrial enterprises.

And here we come to the point. For the spirit of inquiry, the foundation of science, to grow and flourish, there must be a democratic environment. Science encourages a political view that is egalitarian, pluralistic, liberal. It accentuates freedom of opinion and dissent. It is against all forms of totalitarianism, dogma, mechanization, and blind obedience. As a prominent social psychologist has pointed out, “Men have asked for freedom, justice, and respect precisely as science has spread among them.” 2 In short, the only way organizations can ensure a scientific attitude is to provide the democratic social conditions where one can flourish.

In other words, democracy in industry is not an idealistic conception but a hard necessity in those areas where change is ever present and creative scientific enterprise must be nourished. For democracy is the only system of organization that is compatible with perpetual change.

Retarding Factors

It might be objected here that we have been living in an era of rapid technological change for a hundred years, without any noticeable change in the average industrial company. True, there are many restrictions on the power of executives over their subordinates today compared with those prevailing at the end of the nineteenth century. But this hardly constitutes industrial democracy—the decision-making function is still an exclusive and jealously guarded prerogative of the top echelons. If democracy is an inevitable consequence of perpetual change, why have we not seen more dramatic changes in the structure of industrial organizations? The answer is twofold.

Obsolete Individuals. First, technological change is rapidly accelerating. We are now beginning an era when people’s knowledge and approach can become obsolete before they have even begun the careers for which they were trained. We are living in an era of runaway inflation of knowledge and skill, where the value of what one learns is always slipping away. Perhaps this explains the feelings of futility, alienation, and lack of individual worth that are said to characterize our time.

Under such conditions, the individual is of relatively little significance. No matter how imaginative, energetic, and brilliant individuals may be, time will soon catch up with them to the point where they can profitably be replaced by others equally imaginative, energetic, and brilliant but with a more up-to-date viewpoint and fewer obsolete preconceptions. As Martin Gardner says about the difficulty some physicists have in grasping Einstein’s theory of relativity: “If you are young, you have a great advantage over these scientists. Your mind has not yet developed those deep furrows along which thoughts so often are forced to travel.” 3 This situation is just beginning to be felt as an immediate reality in U.S. industry, and it is this kind of uncontrollably rapid change that generates democratization.

Powers of Resistance. The second reason is that the mere existence of a dysfunctional tendency, such as the relatively slow adaptability of authoritarian structures, does not automatically bring about its disappearance. This drawback must first either be recognized for what it is or become so severe as to destroy the structures in which it is embedded. Both conditions are only now beginning to make themselves felt, primarily through the peculiar nature of modern technological competition.

The crucial change has been that the threat of technological defeat no longer comes necessarily from rivals within the industry, who usually can be imitated quickly without too great a loss, but often comes from outside—from new industries using new materials in new ways. One can therefore make no intelligent prediction about the next likely developments in industry. The blow may come from anywhere. Correspondingly, a viable corporation cannot merely develop and advance in the usual ways. To survive and grow, it must be prepared to go anywhere—to develop new products or techniques even if they are irrelevant to the present activities of the organization.4 Perhaps that is why the beginnings of democratization have appeared most often in industries that depend heavily on invention, such as electronics. It is undoubtedly why more and more sprawling behemoths are planning consequential changes in their organizational structures and climates to release democratic potential.

Farewell to “Great Men”

The passing of years has also given the coup de grace to another force that retarded democratization—the “great man” who with brilliance and farsightedness could preside with dictatorial powers at the head of a growing organization and keep it at the vanguard of U.S. business. In the past, this person was usually a man with a single idea, or a constellation of related ideas, which he developed brilliantly. This is no longer enough.

Today, just as he begins to reap the harvest of his imagination, he finds himself suddenly outmoded because someone else (even perhaps one of his stodgier competitors, aroused by desperation) has carried the innovation a step further or found an entirely new and superior approach to it. How easily can he abandon his idea, which contains all his hopes, his ambitions, his very heart? His aggressiveness now begins to turn in on his own organization; and the absolutism of his position begins to be a liability, a dead hand on the flexibility and growth of the company. But the great man cannot be removed. In the short run, the company would even be hurt by his loss since its prestige derives to such an extent from his reputation. And by the time he has left, the organization will have receded into a secondary position within the industry. It might decay further when his personal touch is lost.

The “cult of personality” still exists, of course, but it is rapidly fading. More and more large corporations (General Motors, for one) predicate their growth not on “heroes” but on solid management teams.

Organization Men. Taking the place of the “great man,” we are told, is the “organization man.” Liberals and conservatives alike have shed many tears over this transition. The liberals have in mind as “the individual” some sort of creative deviant—an intellectual, artist, or radical politician. The conservatives are thinking of the old captains of industry and perhaps some great generals.

Neither is at all unhappy to lose the “individuals” mourned by the other, dismissing them contemptuously as Communists and rabblerousers on the one hand, criminals and Fascists on the other. What is particularly confusing in terms of the present issue is a tendency to equate conformity with autocracy—to see the new industrial organization as one in which all individualism is lost except for a few villainous, individualistic manipulators at the top.

But this, of course, is absurd in the long run. The trend toward the “organization man” is also a trend toward a looser and more flexible organization in which the roles to some extent are interchangeable and no one is indispensable. To many people, this trend is a monstrous nightmare, but one should not confuse it with the nightmares of the past. It may mean anonymity and homogeneity, but it does not and cannot mean authoritarianism, despite the bizarre anomalies and hybrids that may arise in a period of transition.

The reason it cannot is that it arises out of a need for flexibility and adaptability. Democracy and the dubious trend toward the “organization man” alike (for this trend is a part of democratization, whether we like it or not) arise from the need to maximize the availability of appropriate knowledge, skill, and insight under conditions of great variability.

Rise of the Professional. While the “organization man” idea has titillated the public imagination, it has masked a far more fundamental change now taking place; the rise of the “professional.” Professional specialists, holding advanced degrees in such abstruse sciences as cryogenics or computer logic as well as in the more mundane business disciplines, are entering all types of organizations at a higher rate than any other sector of the labor market.

Such people seemingly derive their rewards from inner standards of excellence, from their professional societies, from the intrinsic satisfaction of their tasks. In fact, they are committed to the task, not the job; to their standards, not their boss. They are uncommitted except to the challenging environments where they can “play with problems.”

These new professionals are remarkably compatible with our conception of a democratic system. For like them, democracy seeks no new stability, no end point; it is purposeless, save that it purports to ensure perpetual transition, constant alteration, ceaseless instability. It attempts to upset nothing, but only to facilitate the potential upset of anything. Democracy and professionals identify primarily with the adaptive process, not the “establishment.”

Yet all democratic systems are not entirely so—there are always limits to the degree of fluidity that can be borne. Thus it is not a contradiction to the theory of democracy to find that a particular democratic society or organization may be more “conservative” than an autocratic one. Indeed, the most dramatic, violent, and drastic changes have always taken place under autocratic regimes, for such changes usually require prolonged self-denial, while democracy rarely lends itself to such voluntary asceticism. But these changes have been viewed as finite and temporary, aimed at a specific set of reforms and moving toward a new state of nonchange. It is only when the society reaches a level of technological development at which survival is dependent on the institutionalization of perpetual change that democracy becomes necessary.

Reinforcing Factors

The Soviet Union is rapidly approaching this level and is beginning to show the effects, as we shall see. The United States has already reached it. Yet democratic institutions existed in the United States when it was still an agrarian nation. Indeed, democracy has existed in many places and at many times, long before the advent of modern technology. How can we account for these facts?

Expanding Conditions. First, it must be remembered that modern technology is not the only factor that could give rise to conditions of necessary perpetual change. Any situation involving rapid and unplanned expansion sustained over a sufficient period of time will tend to produce great pressure for democratization. Secondly, when we speak of democracy, we are referring not exclusively or even primarily to a particular political format. Indeed, American egalitarianism has perhaps its most important manifestation not in the Constitution but in the family.

Historians are fond of pointing out that Americans have always lived under expanding conditions—first the frontier, then the successive waves of immigration, now a runaway technology. The social effects of these kinds of expansion are of course profoundly different in many ways, but they share one impact: all have made it impossible for an authoritarian family system to develop on a large scale. Every foreign observer of American mores since the seventeenth century has commented that American children “have no respect for their parents,” and every generation of Americans since 1650 has produced forgetful native moralists complaining about the decline in filial obedience and deference.

Descriptions of family life in colonial times make it quite clear that American parents were as easygoing, permissive, and child oriented then as now, and the children as independent and disrespectful. This lack of respect is not for the parents as individuals but for the concept of parental authority as such.

The basis for this loss of respect has been outlined quite dramatically by historian Oscar Handlin, who points out that in each generation of early settlers, the children were more at home in their new environment than their parents were—had less fear of the wilderness, fewer inhibiting European preconceptions and habits. 5 Furthermore, their parents were heavily dependent on them physically and economically. This was less true of the older families after the East became settled. But nearer the frontier, the conditions for familial democracy became again strikingly marked so that the cultural norm was protected from serious decay.

Further reinforcement came from new immigrants, who found their children better adapted to the world because of their better command of the language, better knowledge of the culture, better occupational opportunities, and so forth. It was the children who were expected to improve the social position of the family and who through their exposure to peer groups and the school system could act as intermediaries between their parents and the new world. It was not so much “American ways” that shook up the old family patterns as the demands and requirements of a new situation. How could the young look to the old as the ultimate fount of wisdom and knowledge when, in fact, their knowledge was irrelevant—when the children indeed had a better practical grasp of the realities of American life than did their elders?

The New Generation. These sources of reinforcement have now disappeared. But a third source has only just begun. Rapid technological change again means that the wisdom of elders is largely obsolete and that the young are better adapted to their culture than are their parents.

This fact reveals the basis for the association between democracy and change. The old, the learned, the powerful, the wealthy, those in authority—these are the ones who are committed. They have learned a pattern and succeeded in it. But when change comes, it is often the uncommitted who can best realize it and take advantage of it. This is why primogeniture has always lent itself so easily to social change in general and to industrialization in particular. The uncommitted younger children, barred from success in the older system, are always ready to exploit new opportunities. In Japan, younger sons were treated more indulgently by their parents and given more freedom to choose an occupation since “in Japanese folk wisdom, it is the younger sons who are the innovators.” 6

Democracy is a superior technique for making the uncommitted more available. The price it extracts is uninvolvement, alienation, and skepticism. The benefits that it gives are flexibility and the joy of confronting new dilemmas.

Retrospective Commentary from Philip Slater

Looking back on this article, I am much less surprised that our prediction came true than that we had the chutzpah to make it. In the past 26 years, I have seen so many reasonable-sounding predictions bite the dust (including several of my own) that I have sworn off the habit altogether.

It’s comforting to see that there are still predictable trends in our tangled world. It is especially gratifying to realize that the observations Warren and I made about the unsung efficiencies of democratic organization are even more true now than they were then (or than they were when Mary Parker Follett first made them half a century before that).

Some ideas in the article seem rather dated—the 1960s, after all, had scarcely begun. Our nostalgic farewell to the “cult of personality” was particularly premature—the national tendency to fawn over papier-mâché heroes shows little sign of having peaked. Moreover, the liberalizing trend in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev was just about to be soundly squelched. U.S. media are notoriously blind to long-term trends; to them, the Khrushchev era was over. In fact, it was by no means over.

It spawned a generation of leaders—Gorbachev and his cohorts—who realized the direction the Soviet Union would have to take and waited patiently for the opportunity to take it there.

The biggest surprise in the past quarter-century has been the deterioration of democracy in the United States and the resulting loss of its preeminent position among the nations of the world. Only in the most limited military sense can we still boast of being “number one.” In all other respects—economic, social, scientific, technological, artistic—we are falling behind Europe and the Far East.

This loss of democratic vitality is a result of both the rigid, cold war mentality that has dominated government policymaking and the private sector’s obsession with short-term profit. The executive branch of the U.S. government has become bloated, bureaucratized, over-centralized, and militarized to the point where comparisons with the Soviet Union are no longer tenuous. Democratic control over this behemoth has virtually disappeared. The checks and balances designed to prevent authoritarian rule have been subverted by executive power, and Congress has in effect surrendered to the president its power to declare war. All key national policies are now made secretly by an unelected body—the National Security Council—which operates in a manner indistinguishable from the Politburo.

Meanwhile, only a fraction of the population votes, and the outcome of most elections can be predicted by the amount of money spent by the candidates. The media have ceased to play an independent role—doing little more than uncritically relaying government handouts to the public.

And while our most progressive private enterprises are more democratically organized than when we wrote this article, the overriding trend in our society has been agglomeration, to the point where 1% of all corporations account for 87% of sales—a situation in which the word “private” no longer has substantive meaning.

A giant bureaucracy is cumbersome, inefficient, and allergic to change, no matter who runs it. This was our point 26 years ago, and society is paying a heavy price for having forgotten it.

Doubt and Fears

Indeed, we may even in this way account for the poor opinion democracy has of itself. We underrate the strength of democracy because it creates a general attitude of doubt, skepticism, and modesty. It is only among the authoritarian that we find the dogmatic confidence, the self-righteousness, the intolerance and cruelty that permit one never to doubt oneself and one’s beliefs. The looseness, sloppiness, and untidiness of democratic structures express the feeling that what has been arrived at today is probably only a partial solution and may well have to be changed tomorrow.

In other words, one cannot believe that change is in itself a good thing and still believe implicitly in the rightness of the present. Judging from the report of history, democracy has always underrated itself—one cannot find a democracy anywhere without also discovering (side by side with expressions of outrageous chauvinism) an endless pile of contemptuous and exasperated denunciations of it. (One of the key issues in our national politics today, as in the presidential campaign in 1960, is our “national prestige.”) And perhaps this is only appropriate. For when a democracy ceases finding fault with itself, it has probably ceased to be a democracy.

Overestimating Autocracy. But feeling doubt about our own social system need not lead us to overestimate the virtues and efficiency of others. We can find this kind of overestimation in the exaggerated fear of the “Red Menace”—mere exposure to which is seen as leading to automatic conversion. Few authoritarians can conceive of the possibility that an individual could encounter an authoritarian ideology and not be swept away by it.

More widespread is the “better dead than Red” mode of thinking. Here again we find an underlying assumption that communism is socially, economically, and ideologically inevitable—that once the military struggle is lost, all is lost. Not only are these assumptions patently ridiculous; they also reveal a profound misconception about the nature of social systems. The structure of a society is not determined merely by a belief. It cannot be maintained if it does not work—that is, if no one, not even those in power, is benefiting from it. How many times in history have less civilized nations conquered more civilized ones only to be entirely transformed by the cultural influence of their victims? Do we then feel less civilized than the Soviet Union? Is our system so brittle and theirs so enduring?

Actually, quite the contrary seems to be the case. For while democracy seems to be on a fairly sturdy basis in the United States (despite the efforts of self-appointed vigilantes to subvert it), there is considerable evidence that autocracy is beginning to decay in the Soviet Union.

Soviet Drift

Most Americans have great difficulty in evaluating the facts when they are confronted with evidence of decentralization in the Soviet Union, of relaxation of repressive controls, or of greater tolerance for criticism. We do not seem to sense the contradiction when we say that these changes were made in response to public discontent. For have we not also believed that an authoritarian regime, if efficiently run, can get away with ignoring the public’s clamor?

There is a secret belief among us that either Khrushchev must have been mad to relax his grip or that it is all part of a secret plot to throw the West off guard: a plot too clever for naive Americans to fathom. It is seldom suggested that “de-Stalinization” took place because the rigid, repressive authoritarianism of the Stalin era was inefficient and that many additional relaxations will be forced upon the Soviet Union by the necessity of remaining amenable to technological innovation.

But the inevitable Soviet drift toward a more democratic structure is not dependent on the realism of leaders. Leaders come from communities and families, and their patterns of thought are shaped by their experiences with authority in early life, as well as by their sense of what the traffic will bear. We saw that the roots of democracy in the United States were to be found in the nature of the American family. What does the Soviet family tell us in this respect?

Pessimism regarding the ultimate destiny of Soviet political life has always been based on the seemingly fathomless capacity of the Soviet people for authoritarian submission. Their tolerance for autocratic rulers was only matched by their autocratic family system, which, in its demand for filial obedience, was equal to those of Germany, China, and many Latin countries. Acceptance of authoritarian rule was based on this early experience in the family.

But modern revolutionary movements, both fascist and communist, have tended to regard the family with some suspicion, as the preserver of old ways and as a possible refuge from the State. Fascist dictators have extolled the conservatism of the family but tended at times to set up competitive loyalties for the young. Communist revolutionaries, on the other hand, have more unambivalently attacked family loyalty as reactionary and have deliberately undermined familial allegiances, partly to increase loyalty to the state, partly to facilitate industrialization and modernization by discrediting traditional mores.

Such destruction of authoritarian family patterns is a two-edged sword that eventually cuts away political as well as familial autocracy. The state may attempt to train submission in its own youth organizations, but so long as the family remains an institution, this earlier and more enduring experience will outweigh all others. And if the family has been forced by the state to be less authoritarian, the result is obvious.

In creating a youth that has a knowledge, a familiarity, and a set of attitudes more appropriate for successful living in the changing culture than those of its parents, the autocratic state has created a Frankensteinian monster that will eventually sweep away the authoritarianism in which it is founded. The Soviet Union’s attempts during the late 1930s to reverse its stand on the family perhaps reflect some realization of this fact. Khrushchev’s denunciations of certain Soviet artists and intellectuals also reflect fear of a process going further than what was originally intended.

A similar ambivalence has appeared in China, where the unforeseen consequences of the slogan “all for the children” recently produced a rash of articles stressing filial obligations. As W. J. Goode points out, “The propaganda campaign against the power of the elders may lead to misunderstanding on the part of the young, who may at times abandon their filial responsibilities to the State.”7

Retrospective Commentary from Warren G. Bennis

It’s wonderful—perhaps because it’s so rare—to re-read something you wrote 26 years ago and discover you were right.

In 1990, after the extraordinary recent events in Eastern Europe, including the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, it seems obvious that democracy was inevitable. But 26 years ago, in the heat of the Cold War, it was not so certain. When Philip Slater and I first argued that democracy would eventually dominate in both the world and the workplace, a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union seemed more likely than a McDonald’s in Moscow.

Slater and I saw a common thread running through the most exciting organizations of the time: as the once-absolute power of top management atrophied, a more collegial organization where good ideas were valued even if they weren’t the boss’s was emerging. We were convinced democracy would triumph for a simple but utterly compelling reason—it worked. It was, and is, more effective than autocracy, bureaucracy, and other nondemocratic forms of organization.

It is only fair to note that in international politics, democratization is a very recent phenomenon, although a profound one. Only a year ago, Nicolae Ceausescu had the power to ban birth control in Romania and require that every typewriter be registered. The state even regulated the temperature of Romanian households. The events of recent months are even more remarkable because they were so long in coming. It was easier to speculate 26 years ago that democracy was inevitable than to imagine five months ago that the notoriously repressive military government of Myanmar, formerly Burma, would be ousted peacefully by the National League for Democracy, as it was in May of this year.

The democratization of the workplace has made fewer headlines but has been no less dramatic. In the 1960s, participative management was a radical enough notion that some of the Sloan fellows at MIT accused me of being a Communist for espousing it. Now most major corporations practice some form of egalitarian management. The pyramid-shaped organization chart has gone the way of the Edsel.

The change is pervasive. Self-managed work groups are replacing assembly lines in auto plants. Organizations as disparate as Herman Miller, the manufacturer of office furniture, and Beth Israel Hospital in Boston have adopted the democratic management techniques of the late Joseph Scanlon, one of the first to appreciate that employee involvement is crucial for quality control. At Hewlett-Packard’s facility in Greeley, Colorado, most decisions are made not by traditional managers but by frontline employees who work in teams on parts of projects. Even project coordination is done by team representatives, working on committees known as “boards of directors.”

No longer a monolith, the successful modern corporation is a Lego set whose parts can be readily reconfigured as circumstances change. The old paradigm that exalted control, order, and predictability has given way to a nonhierarchical order in which all employees’ contributions are solicited and acknowledged and in which creativity is valued over blind loyalty. Sheer self-interest motivated the change. Organizations that encourage broad participation, even dissent, make better decisions. In a recent study, Rebecca A. Henry, a psychology professor at Purdue University, found that groups are better forecasters than are individuals. And the more the group disagrees initially, the more accurate the forecast is likely to be.

Slater and I were right on target, I think, in writing both that adaptability would become the most important determinant of an organization’s survival and that information would drive the organization of the future. The person who has information wields more power than ever before. And even though industrial applications of the computer were still in their first decade, we sensed how important processing technology would be, largely, I suspect, because we were working in the Boston area, the birthplace of so much of the new technology.

I don’t think we fully appreciated, however, the extent to which the new technology would accelerate the pace of change and help create a global corporation, if not a global village. With computers and fax machines, New York Life Insurance processes its claims not in New York or even the United States but in Ireland. Several years ago, I invited the Dalai Lama to participate in a seminar for CEOs at the University of Southern California. The embodiment of thousands of years of Tibetan spiritualism graciously declined by fax.

Slater and I failed to foresee one development that would profoundly change organizational life: the extraordinary role Japan would play in shaping U.S. corporate behavior in the 1980s. The discovery that another nation could challenge U.S. dominance in the market-place inspired massive self-evaluation and forever disrupted the status quo. Nothing contributed more to the democratization of business than the belief, true or false, that Japanese management was more consensual than U.S. management. To meet Japanese competition, U.S. leaders were willing to do anything, even share their traditional prerogatives with subordinates.

So a new kind of leader has emerged who is a facilitator, not an autocrat, an appreciator of ideas, not necessarily a fount of them. The Great Man—or Woman—still exists as the public face of companies and countries, but the leader and the organization are no longer one and the same.

Around the world, the generals are being ousted and the poets are taking charge. Slater and I argued that the military-bureaucratic model was increasingly obsolete and was being replaced by a scientific model. That is still true. Science not only tolerates change; it creates change. And, as we wrote, science flourishes only in a democracy, the one form of organization recognizing that creativity, an invaluable commodity, is utterly unpredictable and can come from any quarter.

Further, what the derogation of parental wisdom and authority has begun, the fierce drive for technological modernization will finish. Each generation of youth will be better adapted to the changing society than its parents were. And each generation of parents will feel increasingly modest and doubtful about overvaluing its wisdom and superiority as it recognizes the brevity of its usefulness.
• • •

We cannot, of course, predict what forms democratization might take in any nation of the world, nor should we become unduly optimistic about its impact on international relations. Although our thesis predicts the democratization of the entire globe, this is a view so long range as to be academic. There are infinite opportunities for global extermination before we reach any such stage of development.

We should expect that in the earlier stages of industrialization, dictatorial regimes will prevail in all of the less developed nations. And as we well know, autocracy is still highly compatible with a lethal if short-run military efficiency. We may expect many political grotesques, some of them dangerous in the extreme, to emerge during this long period of transition, as one society after another attempts to crowd the most momentous social changes into a generation or two, working from the most varied structural baselines.

But barring some sudden decline in the rate of technological change and on the (outrageous) assumption that war will somehow be eliminated during the next half-century, it is possible to predict that after this time, democracy will be universal. Each revolutionary autocracy, as it reshuffles the family structure and pushes toward industrialization, will sow the seeds of its own destruction, and democratization will gradually engulf it.

We might, of course, rue the day. A world of mass democracies may well prove homogenized and ugly. It is perhaps beyond human social capacity to maximize both equality and understanding on the one hand, diversity on the other. Faced with this dilemma, however, many people are willing to sacrifice quaintness to social justice, and we might conclude by remarking that just as Marx, in proclaiming the inevitability of communism, did not hesitate to give some assistance to the wheels of fate, so our thesis that democracy represents the social system of the electronic era should not bar these persons from giving a little push here and there to the inevitable.

2. N. Sanford, “Social Science and Social Reform,” Presidential Address for the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues at Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., August 28, 1958.

3. Relativity for the Million (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962), p. 11.

Philip Slater is artistic director of the Santa Cruz County Actors’ Theatre. The author of many books and articles, his most recent book is Creative Chaos: Stumbling Toward Democracy, to be published by Beacon Press in 1991.

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